An Approach for Privacy-Aware Mobile App Package Recommendation

With the prosperity of the mobile Internet, the abundance of data makes it difficult for users to choose their favorite app. Thus, mobile app recommendation as an emerging topic attracts lots of attention. However, existing methods for app recommendation rarely consider recommendation accuracy under the privacy representation of user preferences. To address this problem, we propose a privacy-aware app package recommendation method named APP-Rec. Specifically, in this method: 1) treat an app and its associated heterogeneous entities (APP-Rec considers not only the apps themselves but also a variety of related factors—collectively referred to as heterogeneous entities, such as app category and app neighbors) as an app package and extract comprehensive features from the app package using an intrapackage attention network and an interpackage attention network to improve app recommendation; and 2) design a privacy module utilizing Laplace noise to achieve privacy preservation of user preferences. Experimental results show that APP-Rec outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of area under the curve (AUC). Moreover, the privacy preservation of user preferences in APP-Rec is proved by theoretical analysis and experimental results.